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Tuesday, 29 March 2016

The incident at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801 when Nelson
put his telescope to his blind eye and stated “I really do not see the signal!”
is the most famous case of a Royal Navy officer disobeying orders and thereby achieving
victory. A less well-known case occurred some four decades earlier in the West
Indies.

The Seven Years War of 1756 – 1763 should merit the title of
“The First World War,” for was the first to be fought on a global scale. It was
longer indeed than seven years, for hostilities had opened between Britain and
Britain in North America in 1754, triggered by an incident in Pennsylvania
involving a 22-year old officer called George Washington. Two years later the
conflict took on an even wider European dimension. The British-led alliance
included Prussia, Portugal and the smaller German states, including Hanover,
and was opposed by a French alliance with the Austrian Empire, Spain, Sweden
and Saxony. Russia was initially allied with Austria but changed sides halfway
through. Vast in geographical scope, it was a war in which, in Thomas Babington
Macaulay’s phrase, European enmities ensured that “black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each
other by the great lakes of North America.”

Battle of Lagos in 1759 off Portugal - painting by Thomas Luny

1759 proved to be the “Year of Victories” that firmly
established Britain as a global power with battles won and conquests made by
land and sea. Most notable was the capture of Quebec (and of French Canada
thereafter), the smashing of a French army at Minden in Central Germany and the
two massive naval victories of Lagos and Quiberon Bay. Less well known was the capture
of the French island of Guadeloupe, in the West Indies in M1y 1759 after a
four-month naval and land campaign. As a sugar-producer the island was of great
economic significance and it also acted as a refuge for French privateers.

Sir John Moore

The “disobedience case” referred to earlier occurred at the climax
of the campaign when the British commodore, Sir John Moore (1718-1779) in
charge of the naval forces proposed a direct bombardment of Guadeloupe’s fortified
citadel. Attacks by ships on fixed defences were always dangerous (Nelson once stated
that “A ship’s a fool to fight a fort”) and
in a council of war the majority of Moore’s officers advised against it. The
opposition was led by Captain – later Admiral – Clark Gayton (1712-1785) who
commanded the 96-gun line-of-battle-ship HMS St. George. Commodore Moore had apparently taken offence at Gayton’s
stance and he accordingly assigned the St.
George to lead the attack – which could be construed as an honour – but he
followed this up by sending Gayton a written order to proceed. This could be regarded as a slight – a verbal
order should have been sufficient – and as implying reluctance, and at worst
want of courage. Gayton was deeply offended.

The attack on Guadeloupe 1759

The upshot was that Gayton not only brought the St. George into close action with the fort,
close enough for its fire to envelop her. The bombardment lasted several hours and
all the British ships suffered severely from shore-battery fire without any apparent
effect on the citadel. Commodore Moore now began to doubt the wisdom of his
decision to attack and – probably to his mortification – signalled to the St. George to break off the action. When
Gayton was made aware of the signal he determined to ignore it – his honour had
been impugned and he had no intention of retreating at this stage. Commodore
Moore followed this up by sending a boat with a verbal order to retreat.
Instead of obeying it, Gayton told the officer who brought it that he would
require a written order from Moore before he would feel justified in leaving
his post.

Admiral Clark Gayton

by John Singleton Copeley 1779

While this to-ing and fro-ing was in progress the St.George maintained a constant fire and
at last a lucky shell reached the citadel’s magazine. It blew up before Moore’s
written order was received by Gayton. His honour was thus redeemed – and indeed
in the process secured victory for the Commodore.

The incident did not damage Gayton’s reputation or prospects
and he finished his career as an admiral, following a very successful posting
as commander of the Jamaica station during the American War of Independence.

An interesting footnote was that Gayton’s ship, the 1230-ton
St.George, was one of the oldest
major units in the navy at the time of the Guadeloupe action. She had been laid
launched in 1668, and originally known as HMS Charles, and renamed St.George in 1691. She was rebuilt in 1701 and six years later was one of the ships to escape the mass-wrecking
of Sir Cloudesley Shovell's fleet in the Scilly Isles. She was to be rebuilt twice
more – in 1726 and 1740. Having amassed significant battle-honours she was finally
broken up in 1774. Few ships of the Royal Navy can have been so long-lived.

Friday, 18 March 2016

As a prisoner on HMS Bellerophon,
prior to his exile on St. Helena, Napoleon told its commander, Captain
Maitland, that, "If it had not been
for you English, I should have been Emperor of the East; but wherever there is water
to float a ship, we are sure to find you in our way." This ability was
to manifest itself on numerous occasions up to the middle of the next century. Small
Royal Navy units were to operate in China on the Upper Yangtze, on Lake Tanganyika
and on the Nile in the Sudan, in the Caspian Sea and on remote Russian rivers during
the Russian Civil War and they were to reach Vienna, some 800 miles up the Danube
from the Black Sea at the end of World War 1. More impressive of all these achievements was
however that, not of a small gunboat, but of a cruiser of over 2000 tons that
reached Peru in 1909. This does not perhaps seem remarkable – Peru has a long
coast on the Pacific Ocean – until it is realised that the approach was from the
east, up the Amazon River, almost to its headwaters.

Launched in 1896, the name ship of a class of eleven, HMS Pelorus was a third-class protected
cruiser. “Protected” meant that the vessel’s sides were not armoured but that
an arched armoured deck protected the boilers, engines and other vital areas. “Third
Class” implied a small vessel, suited to commerce-protection duties, or for
scouting for larger units. Pelorus
and her ten sisters were 2135-ton, 300-feet long vessels and their 7000-hp gave
them a top speed of 20 knots. Crewed by 224 men, their main armament consisted
of eight 4-inch breech loading guns for ant-ship use, supplemented by eight 3-pounder
quick-firing weapons for defence against attack by torpedo boats. They also
carried two 18-inch torpedo tubes.

Rudyard Kipling in the 1890s

Pelorus served almost
ten years in the “Channel Fleet” – that tasked with operations in the North
Atlantic and the North Sea but in 1906 she was posed to the Cape of Good Hope
Station. Although only a small unit in a navy made up of hundreds of ships, she
had already achieved fame through a series of articles published in the Morning Post newspaper, and subsequently
gathered into a small book entitled “A Fleet
in Being”. The author was the writer and poet Rudyard Kipling, who was a friend
of a Captain E.H. Bayley, who was then commanding Pelorus. In 1897, as a guest
of Bayly, Kipling was on board Pelorus
for two weeks during the Fleet’s summer exercises and he was to repeat the experience
the following year. His writings about his
time on Pelorus give fascinating
insights into shipboard naval life in the late nineteenth-century. There if however
a strong impression of forced enthusiasm, of determination to see everything
through rose-tinted glasses, and to give an epic quality to what were, in
reality, peacetime manoeuvres. As with much of Kipling’s writings the treatment
of individuals is condescending and patronising, and leaves a sour taste with
at least one modern reader.

Manaus Opera House - best known symbol of the Amazon rubber boom(photograph by Pontanegra via Wikipedia)

In 1909 the “Rubber Boom” in Brazil and Peru was in full
swing. The rubber in question grew wild
in the forests lining the Amazon and its tributaries as plantation growing of
rubber in Malaya had not yet taken off on the large scale it was to become. The
arrival of the automobile had pushed the demand for rubber to unprecedented
levels and fortunes were made by anybody who could organise its collection from
trees growing wild in the forest. This was the era when the city of Manaus was
to build its exotic opera house at the confluence of the Amazon and the Rio
Negro, the period immortalised in Werner Herzog’s stunning movie “Fitzcaraldo”. British commercial firms
were active in the trade and it was only by the investigations in 1910 and 1911
of a British consul, Roger Casement, that the true nature of their activities
was revealed.

Enslaved Peruvian Indians during the rubber boom

In the Putomayo of north-eastern Peru he found that indigenous
tribes were begin forced into unpaid labour – essentially slavery – to collect the
forest rubber. Abuse of these innocent people included starvation-level feeding,
physical abuse, rape of women and girls, branding and casual murder. The chief
offender was the Peruvian Amazon Company
(PAC), which had been registered in Britain in 1908 and had a British board of
directors and numerous stockholders. Casement’s report aroused public outrage
in Britain but what in the end brought a complete end to the abuses was the
arrival of cheaper, plantation-grown rubber from Malaya that made wild-rubber
collection economically unattractive. (Casement’s career was to end in hanging
in 1916 as an Irish Republican working closely with Imperial Germany).

Pelorus's 200-mile route up the Amazon

Casement’s uncovering of the realities of the rubber trade
were still a year and more in the future when, in February 1909, HMS Pelorus
arrived in the eastern Peruvian town of Iquitos, on the upper reaches of the Amazon.
The objective of this good-will visitwas to help promotion of British exports
to Peru as the rubber boom had created an enormous demand for goods from the
industrialised world. The arrival of a sophisticated warship was ample proof of
similarly sized, or smaller, steamships, being well capable of following the
same route. The achievement was a spectacular one – Pelorus had navigated some 2000 miles of winding, often
forest-lined, river from the river’s estuary on the South Atlantic coast. On
arrival at Iquitos the nearer ocean was the Pacific, a mere 600 miles away, but
with the Andes mountain range lying between. Despite its isolation, Iquitos, a
town of 30,000, boasted electric
lighting, tramways, a theatre and,
apparently, a cinema. The seven day visit followed the usual pattern for such “showing
the flag” missions – dinners, speeches, an open-day for the public, a football
match, a concert and a “cinematograph show”. (One wonders what was shown at the
latter.)

Pelorus needed to
replenish her bunkers before embarking on the return trip. Remarkably, she was
to do so with Welsh coal which was apparently a normal import to the area from
Britain for use on river craft. The costs of its transportation raised the cost
to more than four times its British level. With congratulations, well-wishes
and handshakes all round Pelorus then
commenced her voyage homewards, docking at Manaus and Belem en route to the Atlantic. She spent six-weeks
in total on the Amazon and was a matter of pride for both captain and crew that
the river passage had been a healthy one, with minimum sickness and, despite the
prevalence of mosquitoes and insects, no cases of fever.

The Amazon voyage was Pelorus’s
last moment in the limelight. By the time of outbreak of war in 1914 she and the
few of her sisters still in service were old, obsolete ships suited only to secondary
duties. She was scrapped in 1920.

One wonders if the Indians in the Putomayo area, north of
Iquitos, who laboured in slavery for the London-based Peruvian Amazon Company, ever heard of the visit. Even if they did
it is unlikely that they would have been able to go on board during Pelorus’s open day.

Britannia’s Reach by
Antoine Vanner

"Britannia’s
reach is not just political or military alone. What higher interest can there
be than consolidation of Britain’s commercial interests?” So says one of
the key figures in this novel , which centres on the efforts of a British owned
company – not unlike the Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC) – to reassert control of
its cattle-raising investment in Paraguay, following a revolt by its workers.
The story of desperate riverine combat brings historic naval fiction into the
age of Fighting Steam. Click on the image below for more details.

Tuesday, 15 March 2016

Though mention warfare in the Age of Fighting Sail so often conjures
up images of major fleet actions such as Camperdown, The Nile, and Trafalgar, single-ship
actions between small vessels represented the vast majority of combats at sea.
One of the most remarkable of these – stranger than fiction indeed - occurred
in the Indian Ocean, off Madagascar in 1806. It did not involve ships of the official
British and French navies but rather two privateers – privately owned vessels which
had been issued “letters of marque”
by their governments and thereby authorised to wage war on their behalf. The
profit motive was powerful in such cases and where possible the objective was
to capture enemy commerce rather than to risk combat.

A classic image of small-ship action in the Napoleonic era -

A brig chasing a privateer by Thomas
Buttersworth (1768-1842)

A John Myers (I have no information on his previous or
subsequent career) was serving as first lieutenant on the privateer Tamar in September 1806. Close to Madagascar
this vessel captured a small French privateer, the Bon Fortune, which was operating out of the French island stronghold,
the Isle de France, now known as Mauritius. The crew was removed to the Tamar and Myers took over the Bon Fortune with a prize crew of fourteen
men. The two vessels separated in the night but the following morning Myers saw
a strange sail approaching at speed and her general appearance indicated that
she was La Brave, a large privateer
carrying 16 guns and 130 men, which had been operating in the area with
considerable success.

Myers recognised that he had no hope of escaping this enemy vessel
or of defeating her in straight combat but he settled on a stratagem that was
as audacious as it was dangerous. La
Brave had a reputation for capturing her prizes by boarding with almost her
entire crew, a manoeuvre that avoided damage and potential loss of valuable
cargos. Myers accordingly brought the Bon
Fortune’s two portside guns across to supplement the two on the starboard
side, on which La Brave was
approaching. He had them all loaded and the remaining gunpowder was then dumped
overboard. His vessel carried one boat only and this he had lowered from the stern,
filled with small-arms and secured close to the cabin’s portside port. He then
briefed his crew on what he wanted of them and waited. As La Brave closed to “within pistol shot” Bon Fortune opened fire and received a broadside in return. The
French ship then crashed into her, her bowsprit lodging in the Bon Fortune’s rigging. Briefly locked together, La Brave repeated the manoeuvre for
which she was known – the greater part of her crew, all but four men, swarming across
to take the prize. They met no opposition. Myers and his crew had retreated to the
stern cabin and had locked themselves in. The French placed guards on the door
to prevent a sally.

No illustrations seem to exist of the Bon Fortune vs. La Brave action but it might have looked like this:In 1797 HMS Nimble captured the French
privateer cutters Bonheur, and L'Impromptu

The ships had by now drifted apart and Myers and his crew
piled out of the cabin and into the boat secured alongside. They cut the rope
that secured it and rowed frantically away towards La Brave. As they boarded her the four Frenchmen left on board ran
to opposed them. Two were killed and the other two secured. Myers’ men now had
control of La Brave and he brought
her around under the stern of the vessel he had just vacated, bringing all guns
to bear on it. Under threat of raking by the ship he had just lost, La Brave’s captain surrendered on
promise of his crew’s treatment as prisoners of war.

Now with both La Brave
and the Bon Fortune under his
command, Myers set out to search for his parent ship, the Tamar. He found her three days later but the appearance of La Brave in the Bon Fortune’s company raised fears that both ships were under
French control. The Tamar made every
preparation to open fire and Myers lowered his topsails in sign of capitulation
and sent his men below decks to minimise the risk of casualties. Disaster was
thus avoided.

Myers continued in command of La Brave for several months until she in turn was captured by the
French frigate Tamise. He was
received honourable treatment as a prisoner at Port Louis, on the Isle de
France. It would be interesting to know what became of him subsequently. Would
any of this blog’s readers know?

Tuesday, 8 March 2016

This article
deals with the most notable naval “last stands” of the Napoleonic era.

In an earlier
blog article we encountered the innovative sloop, HMS Dart, when she went into attack on the heavily defended French base
at Dunkirk in 1800 (Click here for this article). The Dart and her sister HMS Arrow,
were experimental vessels, never indeed to be repeated. They were the
brain-child of Sir Samuel Bentham (1757 – 1831) – brother of the philosopher
Jeremy Bentham. At this stage in a remarkable career as an engineer and naval
architect, in Britain, Russia and China, Sir Samuel held the position of
Inspector General of Naval Works. These two vessels were virtually double-ended
and featured a large breadth-to-length ratio, structural bulkheads, and sliding
keels. Of 150 tons and a mere 80 feet long overall, they packed an enormous
punch for their size, all guns being carronades, twenty-four 32-pounders on the
upper deck, two 32 pounders on the forecastle and another two on the
quarterdeck.

Close up of HMS Arrow - detail from larger painting shown below

The second of
the sister-vessels, HMS Arrow, left
Malta in January 1805, under the command of Commander Richard Vincent (1770–1831),
to escort a British convoy of 34 merchant vessels headed westwards out of the
Mediterranean. Accompanying her, as the only other escort, was HMS Acheron, commanded by Commander Arthur
Farquhar (1772 – 1843). The latter was somewhat of an unusual choice, as she
was a bomb vessel, a 388-ton, 108-foot merchant ship that had been converted to
carry a 10-inch mortar and a massive 13-inch weapon for shore bombardment.
Though these mortars was unsuited to ship-to-ship action, Acheron did however carry a heavy close-range armament of eight
24-pounder carronades. Once again, as we see in so many accounts of actions in this
era, the carronade was to provide notably strong gun-power to a small
vessel.

The convoy
had passed out into the Atlantic through the Straits of Gibraltar when on the
morning of 3rd February two large vessels were seen coming up fast
from astern. These were initially thought to be laggards from the convoy but as
they closed they were perceived to be most likely warships. Commander Vincent
on the Arrow accordingly signalled to
Acheron to investigate. The strangers
proved to be powerful 40-gun French frigates, later to be identified as the Hortense and the Incorruptible. Neither Arrow
nor Acheron could be considered a
fair match for either. A stern chase developed and continued through the day
but by nightfall it was obvious that there would be no way of escaping. The
options were to fight or to surrender. Commander Vincent chose to fight.

French frigate Incorruptible

It appears
that Vincent had previously made an agreement with the captains of the larger
merchant ships in the convoy that carried guns to form a line of battle in such
circumstance. He now called on them to do so but according to one account “these gentlemen were of the opinion that
discretion was the better part of valour… they did not even answer the signal.”

Darkness had
now fallen, so too the wind, and no contact were made with the enemy during the
night. A breeze sprung up with first light the following morning however and one
of the French frigates was revealed to be close enough to hail the Arrow. Vincent was invited to submit and
come on board the French vessel but he replied with a similar request. The
French now opened fire on both Arrow and
Acheron and it was returned, falling
off however until full daylight would allow more accurate shooting. At seven o’clock
the real action began – one can imagine the preparations on all the ships during
the three or so hours immediately prior to this, and the sense of supressed fear
that must have reigned among the crews.

Opening oaf action: on left Acheron takes on Incorruptible and on right Arrow engages Hortenseby
Francis Sartorius Jr. (c) National Maritime Museum; Supplied by The Public
Catalogue Foundation

Both British
and French vessels opened fire almost simultaneously. The Hortense concentrated on the Arrow
while her sister Incorruptible
focussed on the Acheron. The wind was
so light that the vessel had difficulty in manoeuvring but the unequal contest
continued regardless for an hour and twenty minutes. The Arrow sustained massive injury – her masts and rigging badly
damaged, four guns dismounted on her engaged side, her rudder rendered inoperative.
Most serous of all was however that she had taken many hits “between wind and
water” – that is, on her hull below the water line as it was exposed by
rolling. Out of some 132 on board (including several passengers, among them a
lady, her baby and her maid) thirteen men had been killed and twenty-seven
wounded, a casualty rate of 30%. Commander Vincent realised that further
resistance was futile and he struck his colours in surrender. The Arrow was so badly damaged that French
boats were sent across to take off the survivors, her own boats having been badly
damaged. The transfer was just completed when the Arrow rolled over in her beam ends and disappeared.

The Acheron had been in action against the Incorruptible all this time and had
suffered severe damage, but low casualties. She resisted for a quarter hour
longer than Arrow but in the end the Acheron’s Commander Farquhar reluctantly
ordered his colours to be struck as well. She was so badly disabled that the
French set her on fire after her crew had been taken off.

HMS Arrow sinking after surrender, Acheron and Incorruptible still engaging on the right

by Francis Sartorius Jr. (c) National Maritime Museum;
Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

The behaviour
of the French officers and men to their captives offers significant insights to
the state of discipline and morale in Napoleon’s navy at this time. On board the
Hortense the conduct of the officers
was “polite and humane” but they had so little control over their crew that they
were unable to restrain them from pillaging the British prisoners. The treatment
of the prisoners was even worse on the Incorruptible,
the officers themselves “taunting them
with their misfortunes, using very opprobrious terms.”

The sacrifices
of the Arrow and the Acheron brings to mind similarly doomed
resistance by the armed merchant cruisers Rawalpindi
and Jervis Bay in 1939 and 1940 when
they too were faced by overwhelming enemy force while escorting convoys. In all
these cases the “last stands” by the escorts allowed a substantial part of the convoy
to escape. After the Arrow and Acheron action the French frigates captured
only three out of the 34 ships in the convoy. Some of these vessels, now
sailing independently, did however later fall prey to Spanish privateers.

The Acheron’s
crew were taken to Malaga and, as was common at this period, a prisoner-exchange
deal was agreed soon after. Commander Farquhar, his officers, and his crew were
court-martialled on board HMS Royal Sovereign
off Sardinia for the loss of their ship. The court-martial was a formality –
Farquhar was not only acquitted with honour but he was promoted to the coveted
rank of Post Captain. The court-martial president returned Farquhar’s sword
with the words “I hope you will soon be
called upon to meet the Hortense on more equal terms. The result of the contest
may prove more lucrative to you, but it cannot be more honourable” (What a
way with words!)

The Arrow’s crew were taken to Cartagena and
were exchanged some three months later. Their court-martial took place on board
HMS Gladiator in Portsmouth and Commander
Vincent and his men were acquitted with similarly eulogies to those accorded the
Acheron’s crew. Vincent too was
promoted to “post”.

A pleasing
postscript was the two ships’ defence of the convoy was rewarded by commercial organisations.
Swords of Honour were presented to both Vincent and Farquhar by the Lloyds
(Insurance) Patriotic Fund and cash payments were made to wounded, bereaved
families and survivors who had lost all they had when the vessels were destroyed.

Looking back
over two centuries however, the most significant aspect of the action was the
post-victory behaviour of the French crews and the inability of their officers
to control them. It was hard to imagine such men ever prevailing against the discipline
and professionalism of Royal Navy crews. And Trafalgar, only eight months later,
proved that they could not.

Friday, 4 March 2016

This item was originally posted in 2013 when I was first starting blogging and few readers saw it at the time. On looking at it again I thought it might be of interest for the wider audience that I now reach. Comments will be welcome.

In 1851 the English historian and
jurist Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy published his “Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World”. A different outcome of
each of these battles would have resulted in a significantly different course
of world history, and as such they still influence the world we live in today.
As such they represent major “points of departure” for alternative histories.

It is notable that due to Creasy’s
focus on European (and North American) power, and because little was then known
in the West about Far Eastern history, no battles were listed which refer to
China’s consolidation and survival as an imperial power, the failed Mongol
invasions of Japan or to Japan’s failed bid for conquest of Korea in the 15th
and 16th centuries and the implications that had for subsequent Japanese
history. The Mameluk victory in 1260, over
the Mongols at Ain Jalut, in Galilee, which was critical in stemming Mongol
power, was also omitted. Taking these and other Asian battles into account
Creasy’s list might rightly have been extended to 20 or even 25 at the time he
wrote. There is also good reason that he should have included the 1836 Battleof San Jacinto, which led in due course to United States acquisition of a vast areal
percentage, and an economically vital one, of the modern nation.

Since that time various writers have added to
the list of post-1851 battles. Given the increasing pace and scale of conflicts
since then it is not inappropriate to add at least 10. As a starting point for
discussion and speculation, and with all due lack of modesty I’m suggesting the
10 post-1851 decisive battles as below:

1)Gettysburg
(and Vicksburg) 1863: though fought in separate theatres, but at almost exactly
the same time, these battles made the defeat of the Southern Confederacy
inevitable, not least by ending hopes of international recognition. A long
attritional grind lay ahead but Union victory was now inevitable.

2)Sedan1870:
Not only did Bismarck’s Germany crush France decisively, and usher in the new
German Empire, but it was absolute enough to ensure that the French would
ultimately settle for a peace that ceded Alsace and Lorraine, thereby planting
the seeds for WW1.

3)Manila (and
Santiago) 1898: Two naval victories half the globe apart that announced the
arrival of the United States as a world power and established a position in
Asia that would be critical in WW2.

4)Tsu Shima
1905: Japan’s victory over the huge Russian fleet was perhaps the most absolute
in naval history. It marked the arrival of Japan as a major power and
encouraged ambitions that would ultimately lead to WW2 in the Far East and the Pacific.

5)The Marne
1914: Decisive in the sense that Germany could not achieve the quick victory in
the west that it had built its strategy on. From this moment on Germany was on
the back foot in the West. The Western Allies bought time that would ultimately
lead to their defeat of Germany.

6)Warsaw 1920:
Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War was almost absolute when the Red
Army was launched westwards to carry revolution into Central Europe. The new
Polish state worked a miracle in defeating it. It saved Europe but at the cost
of stoking Russian resentment that would exact a terrible revenge in later
decades.

7)The Atlantic
1939-45: Though the struggle to secure Britain’s supply lines climaxed in 1943,
the fight went on from the first to the last day of WW2. Churchill described
the U-Boat menace as the thing that frightened him most – and with good reason.
Without victory in the Atlantic, no Allied victory in Western Europe.

8)Stalingrad
1942-43. The name says it all. No need to say more.

9)Saipan 1944:
I’ve identified the conquest of Saipan rather than the Battle of Midway as being
the decisive battle in the Pacific in WW2. My reasoning is that though Midway
was critical in weakening the Japanese Navy, the United States would still have
prevailed, though over a much longer time scale, if it had lost the battle.
Saipan was critical in identifying the type of war that had to be fought to
beat Japan, leading in due course to the decision to drop nuclear weapons, At
Saipan not only did the Japanese military fight to the death, but huge numbers
of civilians, including women who killed their own children, were prepared not
only to resist but to commit suicide rather than surrender. This was the first
US encounter with a Japanese civilian population and it highlighted just how
costly an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands would be. From this point on I
believe that use of nuclear weapons was unavoidable.

10)The Battle
That Never Was 1983-90: The US commitment to the Strategic Defense Initiative
(SDI – “Star Wars”), whether it was ever technically feasible or not at the
time, was believed to be feasible by the Soviets. Their military budgets were
already an unsustainable percentage of their total economy and the pressure to
compete with Star Wars was possibly the greatest single factor in bringing
about the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union. Not a shot was fired and the
tyranny hundreds of millions had lived under for seven decades died not with a
bang but a whimper.

The list above is obviously subjective and I’d be welcome to hear
comments

Warsaw 1920: The Miracle of the VistulaPoles advance past Marshal Pilsudski to achieve the impossible

Tuesday, 1 March 2016

A Guest Blog by Richard Abbott

We're honoured today to welcome the novelist Richard Abbott as a guest blogger and he brings us back some millennia earlier than the eras normally covered in this blog. His focus of interest is on the earliest civilisations and you can out more about him at the end of the article. Over to Richard!

Prehistoric Seafaring along the Atlantic Coasts

When we think of ships and sailing in the ancient world, the first thing which comes to mind for most people is the Mediterranean scene. Here, within the confines of an almost-enclosed sea, vessels of varying sizes plied a coastal trade. Now, Mediterranean weather can get extremely fierce at times, so there is certainly no guarantee of safety. Nevertheless, the situation faced in northern Europe, along the Atlantic seaboard, was considerably more challenging.

Dover Bronze Age boat remains (Wikipedia)

Two separate strategies emerged – one for exploiting the many rivers of north-west Europe, and the other for proper sea traffic. The river option is fascinating in its own right, spawning a number of technological solutions for carrying people and cargo a long way inland, and shaping settlement patterns which are still visible today. But for today I want to focus on the seagoing option.

Today’s United Kingdom is often characterised by a north-south divide. Simplistically, we have a prosperous and densely populated south, and a rural north with thinly scattered population, supplying a lower fraction of our GDP. The industrial midlands towns have not successfully broken up this picture.

But go back to the Bronze Age, and earlier into the Neolithic, and there is no real sign of this north-south divide. Instead, the divisions of material culture are mainly between east and west. The eastern portion faces towards, and maintains, close cultural links with what we now call Belgium, Holland, Germany and Denmark. Indeed, until only around 7,000 years ago, this connection was in the physical form of a land bridge. The last remnants of "Doggerland", a fertile area occupying much of today’s North Sea, were submerged by rising sea levels rather later than 5000BC.

The western half of the country maintained a rather different material culture, sharing common features with Ireland, Brittany and Galicia. For example, closely related passage and entrance tombs are found in Portugal, Brittany, Scilly, Cornwall, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, but not most of the rest of England, nor in much of France. Clearly the modern concept of an Atlantic coast Celtic identity has some historical truth behind it. Indeed, part of my own DNA preserves the ancestral memory of Galicia and the Iberian peninsula, where some of my remote progenitors waited for the retreat of the ice so they could head north.

Replica of Ferriby boat being sailed (http://www.ferribyboats.co.uk/)

These communities, seemingly separated by the sea but linked by culture – and quite probably language – kept contact with each other by ship. The ocean became a means of connecting settlements, not dividing them. Now, parts of these journeys can be conducted by small coastal hops. Elsewhere, however, you need to set off into deep water, in faith, and using skills and talents cultivated through the generations. Some of these boats were of sewn-plank design, the timbers held together by flexible wooden roots or withies rather than metal fastenings. Others were of animal skin and hide, stretched over a frame of wood or antler, like a curragh. Boats of this basic pattern are still used by the Inuit, albeit with more modern materials. Navigating the approaches to the English Channel, and avoiding the fearsome rocks and reefs of the Scilly Isles, has proved difficult for many ships in the last few hundred years. How challenging was it, I wonder, in an open boat with low freeboard, flexing with every wave?

One of the eight Must Farm Bronze Age boats (archaeology.co.uk)

We have hardly any examples of seagoing ships of this era, largely because little of the construction would survive intact. We can only infer the journeys they made, and the courage they must have shown, by the shared material record they left along the coastline from Spain to Scotland.

A few later hints help us. When Julius Caesar was conducting his characteristically brutal war against the Gauls, he was forced to confront their very capable navy in Morbihan Bay, in southern Brittany. We get the clear impression that purely as sailing vessels, the Gallic ships were superior – built of thick oak timbers, with iron nails and leather sails, these were ships fully capable of facing Atlantic weather. The Romans won by converting the naval conflict into what they knew best. Instead of ship to ship combat, they turned it into an equivalent land battle by using grapples and the crow – a sort of combined hook and gangplank – to immobilise the enemy and allow boarding parties to prevail.

A recent discovery claims to have identified a Roman sword on the east coast of Canada – a claim that most archaeologists are currently treating with scepticism. It seems unlikely that a Mediterranean ship would knowingly make the transatlantic crossing – though there are persistent hints that the Phoenicians might have done this the better part of a thousand years earlier. But single vessels might easily have been caught up in fierce weather and driven far from their intended course. Or the weapon might have been captured in battle by some enterprising Celt, and then carried on what was potentially a regular voyage.

Small clues indeed, but the big picture is that the prehistoric Atlantic coastline was a lively arena. Here the ocean did not divide people: rather it connected them together. Europe’s multicultural roots, and challenges, go back a great many years.

Replica Bronze Age boat on Loch Tay (archaeology.co.uk)

About Richard Abbott

Richard lives in London, England. He writes historical fiction set in the ancient Middle East - Egypt, Canaan and Israel - and also science fiction about our solar system in the fairly near future.

So far his books have not tackled the Atlantic vessels described in the article. This represents research in progress for the next historical novel, which will explore the Late Bronze Age tin trade between the British Isles and the eastern Mediterranean. It is provisionally called A Storm of Wind, and is at an early stage.

His novel The Flame Before Us covers, in part, another bronze age group for whom the Meditteranean was important – The Sea Peoples, who settled in the coastline along from Gaza after a tumultuous approach disrupting cities from the Hittite realm down to the borders of Egypt.

When not writing words or computer code, he enjoys spending time with family, walking, and wildlife, ideally combining all three pursuits in the English Lake District. He is the author of In a Milk and Honeyed Land, Scenes From a Life, The Flame Before Us - and most recently Far from the Spaceports. He can be found at his website (http://www.kephrath.com/) or blog (http://richardabbott.datascenesdev.com/blog/), or various social media sites.

About Me

My "Dawlish Chronicles" are set in the late 19th Century and reflect my deep interest in the politics, attitudes and technology of the period. The fifth novel in the series, “Britannia’s Amazon” is now available in both paperback and Kindle formats. It follows the four earlier Dawlish Chronicles, "Britannia's Wolf", "Britannia's Reach”, "Britannia's Shark" and "Britannia's Spartan". Click on the book covers below to learn more or to purchase.
I’ve had an adventurous career in the international energy industry and am proud of having worked in every continent except Antarctica. History is a driving passion in my life and I have travelled widely to visit sites of historical significance, many insights gained in this way being reflected in my writing. I welcome contact on Facebook and via this Blog. My website is www.dawlishchronicles.com and its “Conflict” section has a large number of articles on topics from the mid-18th Century to the early 20th Century.